At Mona Lisa - the South Florida leg of an 80-year-old bakery from Bensonhurst, Brooklyn - the cannolis are worth offing someone for. The shells are made fresh daily, and they're flaky and airy in all the ways good pastry should be. These cannolis are piped with sugary, cinnamon-enhanced ricotta (properly pronounced "ree-coat-ta") that pours out of the crackling sides with each bite, leaving a pleasant tingle on your tongue.

Pair them with a shot of onyx-hued espresso and a seat in Mona Lisa's sunny, red-brick dining room, and those cannolis are just about flawless. They're only one of the dozens of Italian-American pastries the 40-seat restaurant bakes daily, from lobster tails, a confection shaped like a shellfish and dotted with cannoli cream, to sfogliatelle, a filo-like shell filled with orange-scented cheese. This is to say nothing about the European-style pizza Mona Lisa serves, crisp and flaky-thin, cooked at 850 degrees in the restaurant's coal-burning oven until the crust is taut and slightly charred - a thing of overwhelming beauty, just like the smile in that famous painting.